San Marcos River

In continuing my series of interviews with fellow AMW members, I introduce you to Kathy Waller.

Hi Kathy!

VPC- Tell us about your professional career.

KW-​I ​earned a B.A. in English in August 1973 and two days later began teaching high school English and biology. Eleven years later, I moved to Texas State University (then Southwest Texas State University); the first yearI was a teaching assistant while I completedmy M.A.; the second I taught freshman comp as a lecturer in the English department. After that, I taught another two years at the secondary level.

Then the fun began: I was invited to take the position of school district librarian, and, seeing a challenge—I‘d never taken any library science courses—I accepted. I spent a full semester working as a librarian before diving back into graduate school, this time at the University of Texas. At the time, I planned to complete the M.L.I.S., but life got in the way and I stopped with a learning resources specialist certification.

Two years later, the school district for which I worked partnered with an independent library association to form a joint-use library, extending services to all members of the community. I was fortunate to be involved in designing, building, and networking a new library. I loved the job—selecting and purchasing books and materials (with other people’s money!), doing booktalks, dealing with so many different tasks to make the program work. I especially enjoyed working with adults. Student patrons asked similar questions every year based on recurring class projects, but adults’ needs differed widely. “Is cabbage juice good for you?” “How do you build a beehive?” “Can chemotherapy help treat multiple sclerosis?” “What years and what nights did ‘I Love Lucy’ air?” Someone told me that to make a librarian happy, all you have to do is ask a question—that’s true, and a question the librarian has never been asked makes her the happiest.

VPC– Where did you grow up? What was it like?

KW– ​I grew up in a rural farming community, Fentress, Texas, on the San Marcos River, about fifteen miles south of San Marcos. I believe I’m the fifth generation of my father’s family to live in the area. The town was settled just before the turn of the century–that’s the 20th century–​around a cotton gin and a Presbyterian church, and soon became a resort town, with a skating rink, an aerodrome theater where silent movies were shown and Chautauquas were held. (Note from VP- Chautauquas were an adult education movement in the U.S. that were popular until the mid-1920s. They brought entertainment and culture with speakers, teachers, musicians, entertainers, preachers and specialists of the day. More at Wikipedia.) A dam generated power, and there was a natural swimming pool with slide, diving board, and bath houses, and a large campground. There were boarding houses, a bank, a cafe, an ice cream parlor, grocery stories, a filling station, a drug store, a doctor’s office, and in 1929, a population of about 500.

​When I was growing up there in the 1950s and ’60s, however, things were different. The gin, the skating rink, the grocery stores, and the doctor were still there, but a slight change in the river’s course had taken the swimming pool and resort, and post-World War II urbanization ​had reduced the population to about 125. By the time I started school, most of the residents were over the age of forty.

So I grew up surrounded by older people, most of whom I was related to by blood or by marriage. It could have been a boring existence, but parents there could turn children loose without fear of anything worse than skinned knees or wasp stings, so I had a lot of freedom. Except, of course, with all those aunts and uncles and great-aunts and -uncles, I knew I’d never get away with doing anything particularly interesting.

Still, I got to hang around the post office and listen to the old men sitting on benches outside, and help my postmaster-uncle put up mail (my mother was sure a postal inspector would find me doing that and haul my uncle off to jail), tag along with my grandfather and my farmer-uncle wherever they went, sit under a tree on the river reading American Girl magazine to my horse…. That kind of thing. And to sit on front porches watching old ladies play forty-two and listening to them gossip.

I think the reason many people my age love To Kill a Mockingbird is that we see in 1930s Maycomb, Alabama, the little towns we knew when we were kids twenty and thirty years later—slow, hot, dusty summers, old people sitting on front porches, the feeling that the past is still with us.

VPC– It sounds Idyllic. 🙂 You certainly can paint a picture with words. How did growing up there affect your writing?

KW– Eudora Welty said, “Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.” I was a listening child. I think I was sometimes quiet enough people forgot I was around. And it was evident early on that I recognized which parts of conversations should not be repeated elsewhere. But for whatever reason, adults didn’t seem to censor their conversations around me. And I’ve always had a tape recorder in my head. Hearing so much about the past, both from my parents and from my grandfather and his brothers and sisters, I grew up grounded in local history. I’m really more at home in the past than in the present—sometimes I feel as if I’ve never made it past 1965. Although I don’t remember the busy resort town, the stories I heard were so vivid, I feel as if I‘d been there watching Tom Mix at the aerodrome theater on Saturday nights.

As to how this affects my writing—my background provides material. My characters come from rural Texas, that’s what they know, that’s how they speak. Their levels of education differ, their professions differ. Their speech differs—some are grammatical, some aren’t, some use the figures of speech I grew up hearing—but same Southern voice runs through all my dialogue.

Concerning the people I knew—It was like Charles Dickens created a bunch of characters and gave them Southern accents and set them down in Caldwell County on the banks of the San Marcos River. Everybody—here, I’m talking about the old people—had some little quirk that set him or her apart. It as if they were intended to be re-placed in fiction.As to my settings, there’s nearly always a river, and usually a cow. The less I see of cows in life, the more I have to see them in my fiction.

VPC– How did you come to be a member of AMW?

KW– ​I first met Karen MacInerney in a writing practice group the late 1990s. She founded AMW. When I moved to Austin in 2003, I visited one meeting, but the timing wasn’t right, so I declined. A few years later, Gale Albright and I met at a Writers’ League of Texas meeting and became critique partners; we called ourselves Just for the Hell of It Writers. That was good, but for the best critiques, more than two pairs of eyes are needed. Then I met Kaye George through the Sisters in Crime Guppies online chapter. She’d taken over Austin Mystery Writers from Karen and invited me to join.This time I jumped at the chance, and then Gale joined as well. That marked the demise of Just for the Hell of It Writers, but joining AMW is the best move I’ve made toward a writing career. Receiving thoughtful critical evaluation of my work is invaluable, and receiving it from writers who are supportivewhile telling the truth—I couldn’t ask for a better situation.​

​VPC- This is a tough question. Do you have any favorite authors/mystery authors?

KW– When I was eight, my grandmother gave me copies ofThe Secret of the Old Clock and The Clue of the Tapping Heels,so my first favorite was Nancy Drew.From there I jumped to Agatha Christie; I’ve read most of her books two or three times. When I’m sick, I want Campbell’s tomato soup, saltine crackers, and a Christie. Of the contemporaries, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell–I love Rendell’s tight plotting, where even on the last page, one more thread unravels; it feels like one final bolt falling into place. I like Robert Barnard, Ngaio Marsh… My absolute favorite is probably Josephine Tey. Her books are definitely mysteries, but they’re also more than that. I can’t say just why—later editions have a foreword in which Robert Barnard analyzes what makes Tey’s books special. She can write a satisfying murder mystery without a murder, and an even more satisfying mystery without a hint of murder at all. And I can’t leave out Austin’s Mark Pryor, whose Hollow Man is a devastatingly devastating read—think Ruth Rendell; and Texas native Terry Shames’ Samuel Craddock mysteries, where the low-key police chief keeps twenty head of white-faced Herefords in the pasture back of his house, which is about as authentic small-town Texas as you can get.

Thank you, Kathy for that insight into your past. And I’ve found a few more books to add to my To Read list. (Another note to readers: I can vouch for her recommendations. She’s never steered me wrong. After all, she was a librarian!)

Like this:

It all started with a weekend retreat. Don’t mysteries always start like that? (Well, some of them.)

It’s like the beginning of a typical forties noir film. Think of a battered private dick, his face wrapped in bandages, trapped in a blindingly bright spotlight at the Hollywood police station. All in black and white with lots of shadows. The police want to know about a murder. When he starts talking, the scene dissolves into a flashback.

Except in my case, everything was in color, in the twenty-first century, and by the San Marcos River in Central Texas–not Hollywood.

What on earth are you talking about? I hear someone mutter. Why, I’m flashing back to how I wrote my fast-paced, hard-pulsing, heart-stopping crime melodrama, Holly Through the Heart, a live radio play done in person for an enthusiastic (I hope) audience (captive) of Sisters in Crime: Heart of Texas members.

I had come up with a daring (hare-brained) scheme in September. Why not have an old-fashioned live radio murder mystery play for our Christmas party on December 14? Then I proceeded to ask (beg, cajole) people to be in the cast. I had everything set up. But there was just a tiny, wee problem.

I was having trouble with the play itself. As in, writing it. There were three lovely paragraphs, almost a whole first page done. It was very promising. But I was stuck.

To myself, I said, “Self, you have asked all these folks to be in your play, and we are going to have to rehearse before the show debuts on December 14, so what are you going to do?”

Then fellow AMW critique partner Kathy Waller said we should have a writing retreat the first weekend in October, so we did, at a cabin on the San Marcos River. The cabin was lovely and rustic, surrounded by giant pecan trees and nestled in rural obscurity—except for the eleventy-million trucks hauling monster barbecue smokers in and out of the property next door. There was a barbecue cooking contest being held in close proximity to our cabin on Friday and Saturday. I thought there would be lots of noise and craziness going on next door, but perhaps we might be invited over to partake of delicious delicacies.

But no. There was no offer of succulent meat, but the noise level was kept to a decorous level down by the river. So I couldn’t use loud music and barbecue overdose to excuse my almost nonexistent radio play.

What did I do, you might ask. On Friday night, we went to the Sac ’n Pac on the highway and purchased delicious burgers for our supper. Then we sat around and talked and talked and talked and finally went to sleep.

On Saturday, some troublemaker brought up the fact that we were technically on a writing retreat and that maybe we should write. If I remember correctly, fellow AMW critique partner Valerie Chandler said we should use the Pomodoro technique to write something. We limbered up our laptops and did the Pomodoro. What is the Pomodoro, you may ask? Here’s the word from Wikipedia:

“The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The technique uses a timer to break down work into intervals traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. These intervals are known as “pomodori”, the plural of the Italian word pomodoro for “tomato.” The method is based on the idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility.” Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

I knew I was not motivated. But I sat there, hands poised over the keyboard, the timer went off, and I pounded away for twenty-five minutes. Took a break and then pounded for another twenty-five minutes.

And guess what?

I wrote the whole script.

That Saturday night, after we had gone back to the Sac ’n Pac to get pizza for dinner, we sat around and talked and talked and talked some more. One of the subjects we covered was my anguish over my current book plot. It needed help. So we all brainstormed, lying on couches, eating Goldfish (the baked cheese kind) and cookies and solved my plot problem.

That’s my story, coppers, and no matter how much you grill me, I won’t change my tune. That’s how it all went down.

So now, as I write this blog post on the evening of December 13, waiting for my pot roast to get almost done before I put in the potatoes (battered private dicks sometimes cook), and anticipating putting on the play tomorrow at 2 p.m. at the Book Spot in Round Rock, I think it’s going to be great.

We’ve rehearsed, given feedback, and worked on sound effects. I’ve had directorial angst, but I feel good about the whole thing.

Kudos to Kathy for setting up the writing retreat and for Valerie’s and Kathy’s help with Pomodoro sprints and book plot brainstorming.

Tomorrow Holly Through the Heart has its debut performance far from Broadway, at the Book Spot in Round Rock, Texas. But the journey begins with a single Pomodori, does it not?

I only wish, Valerie, that you had not gotten me addicted to Goldfish, but then artists must suffer, I suppose.

Star Date: December 14, 2014

From left to right: Alex Ferraro, Kathy Waller, David Ciambrone, Gale Albright, and Valerie Chandler, cast of Holly Through the Heart, an old-time radio mystery drama performed live at its debut at the Book Spot on December 14, in Round Rock, TexasA cookie script of Holly Through the Heart, created by culinary genius Valerie Chandler.